Twitter porn worm caused by Australian teenager

A Twitter hack that redirected users to Japanese porn sites – and shut down the White House press secretary’s feed - was apparently caused by an Australian teenager.

A Twitter hack that redirected users to Japanese porn sites – and shut down the White House press secretary’s feed - was apparently caused by an Australian teenager.

Pearce Delphin, whose Twitter name is @zzap, admitted exposing a security flaw in Twitter which was then pounced upon by hackers.

Hackers tweaked the code to redirect users to porn sites and create "worm" tweets that replicated every time they were read. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and Sarah Brown (Gordon’s wife), were among those hit by the bug.

One of the worms attempted to redirect users to a Japanese hardcore site and another sent gibberish out to 100,000 followers of the White House Press secretary.

However, Delphin, who lives with his parents in Melbourne, said he tweeted a piece of "mouseover" JavaScript code - which brings up a pop-up window when the user hovers their cursor over the message - simply to see if it could be done.

The teenager told AFP via email:

"I did it merely to see if it could be done ... that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet. At the time of posting the tweet, I had no idea it was going to take off how it did. I just hadn't even considered it.

"After that, it seems like some of my followers realized the power of this vulnerability, and within a matter of minutes scripts had taken over my timeline."

Twitter have now fixed the Worm while Delphin says he hasn’t yet told his parents that he was responsible for the Twitter meltdown (although here’s guessing they probably know by now).